1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a system and a method for automatically accessing user data records, in particular, via a network.
2. Description of the Related Art
Imagine any of the following situations: A worker collapses on the job with labored breathing. An elderly colleague begins to speak incoherently, becomes disoriented, and turns very pale. A hiker is found unconscious, with a compound fracture and arterial bleeding. An expectant mother staggers into an emergency room with an alarmingly high fever and clear signs of a severe systemic infection.
In all of these situations, emergency medical personnel--those on the scene, in the ambulance, and in the hospital--need fast, accurate information about the medical history of the patient. Only in exceptionally lucky cases, however, will an up-to-date history be available--usually, only when the patient has been to the receiving health-care facility before, was given a thorough medical evaluation and has not been treated elsewhere since. Because of this lack of up-to-date information, proper diagnosis and treatment may be problematic; for example, giving the patient a certain drug might cause severe side effects. For example, emergency personnel may not know that an unconscious patient has been using some dangerously interacting medication, which was prescribed by a physician who is not affiliated with the hospital where the patient has just been admitted. As yet another example, the emergency medical team may have no way to know that the expectant mother is severely allergic to the antibiotic they intend to administer to her.
Unless the patient is wearing a warning bracelet, or is carrying some information identifying her regular physician or clinic, then there is no way at present for the emergency medical personnel to get at the needed, possibly vital, information. The primary care physician may not be available; the far-away clinic may not have the patient's file readily available, and there may not be time to excavate it from the cavernous file room found in many large, modern hospitals.
It is not just in emergencies, moreover, that rapid access to up-to-date health-care information is desirable. Such information is also useful, for example, during normal visits to a patient's ordinary health-care provider, or to a specialist to whom the patient has been referred. At such times it can both save much time and maybe even improve a diagnosis or treatment if the providers, for example, different physicians in a health-care network, can readily access the health and insurance information of patients.
One solution to this problem that has been proposed is for patients--past, present, and potential--to be issued a card that incorporates some form of memory device on which essential health care information is stored. The memory devices in these cards may be magnetically or optically encoded strips that can be read by appropriate conventional readers. Such passive memory devices, however, typically carry only a small amount of data, cannot readily be updated, or require expensive, specialized equipment to change their memory contents. Because of their limited memory capacity and non-updatable nature, the cards serve only to identify the patient, his primary health care provider, and his insurance information. Moreover, smart cards can easily be updated and their storage capacity is greater than that of, for example, magnetic-strip cards, but even their memory capacity is limited and restricts their use to the storage of only a summary medical history.
Yet another problem of existing health care data cards is that, to the extent that they can access remote information at all, doing so requires a dedicated line to some central data base. This line may not be available when needed in an emergency; it may be linked only to one or a few facilities or sites (for example, different sites within a large facility); and other facilities or sites may be linked only by installation of expensive, dedicated hardware.
Still another shortcoming of existing devices for accessing medical records is that their memory contents cannot be updated or otherwise changed except by expensive, specialized equipment, which usually only the card provider has at some remote location. These cards will thus carry outdated or incomplete information for some time after every use.
Some or all of these problems are also encountered in other contexts where complete and accurate information needs to be retrieved from a remote site. For example, the process for getting approval for a loan or mortgage is often delayed by the need to gather the potential borrower's credit records.
What is needed is a system and a method that allow emergency medical personnel to quickly access a potentially large amount of medical data concerning a patient using a readily and widely available communications link. The system should be easy to activate using a device that the patient can carry conveniently. It should preferably also be possible to expand the system. Furthermore, the system should ideally also be flexible enough that it can be applied for quick and secure access to other kinds of user data records.